Beyond Conic Section Mainlobe Coverage for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

The cellular-connected drone market is one of the most promising markets of 5G. However, it still accounts for a small share of the overall telecommunication market, and its share is unlikely to increase significantly in the foreseeable future. Deploying dedicated networks with up-tilted antennas can be an option, but the monetary cost of dedicated networks directly impacts the acceptance of mobile operators. Therefore, cost-efficient aerial coverage solutions must be developed. Reusing a network for terrestrial coverage is a cost-efficient approach for aerial coverage, but several critical challenges caused by antenna sidelobes should be solved. In this paper, a novel method for aerial coverage is proposed. By tweaking the measurement report handling mechanism, signals from sidelobes reported by drones above a predefined height can be identified and ignored. Simulation results show that the conventional cellular network with the proposed method can provide wide and continuous aerial coverage with satisfactory Quality.